


When the Nest is Empty and The Bird Has Flown

by orphan_account



Series: Stony Limits Cannot Hold Love Out [2]
Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F, Polyamory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-20
Updated: 2017-03-20
Packaged: 2018-10-08 03:00:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10376373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Written for the tumblr prompt:Sooo i have a prompt for supercarp Carter goes off to college, which leaves all three of his moms dealing with a bit of a hole in their lives. Maybe you could explore how they deal with him being away? Given that they are all in a sense workaholics, I think that parenting Carter provides an outlet for them outside of their workplaces. Carter being gone might upset the balance that they've created. Do they bury themselves in work and each other? Do they decide to expand their family?





	

“Well, we should keep it as it is,” Cat sighed.  “After all, he’s still going to be coming home during breaks, at least for a little while.” **  
**

Kara looked at Carter’s room: the Star Wars posters, the three bookcases filled with genre fiction and astronomy reference books, the desk still messy as if he’d just gone to the kitchen for a drink.  The three of them had driven him to UC San Diego and dropped him off.  Cat had been in tears, Kara had been barely holding it together.  Lena had hugged him, ruffled his hair, and murmured quietly to him, “Study hard.  Be stupid, but not too stupid.  If you absolutely must smoke weed, call me and I’ll tell you the proper way to do it so that you don’t get kicked out of your dorm.”

Cat punched her in the shoulder.  “Lena!”  

Lena smirked, but she and Carter had exchanged an affectionate glance.  

“Yes,” Kara agreed, looking at his room, at the rumpled bed.  “We should leave it.”

“I don’t know,” Lena commented as she breezed past the doorway, “I think we should let Kara turn it into an art studio.”

Kara looked at Lena, horrified.  “Where will he stay when he’s on break?”

Lena shrugged.  “He can stay at my old place.  Honestly, he’s a young man now, do you think he really wants all three of his mothers fussing over him constantly? I would think he’d love the independence of having a place to himself in a hip part of National City.”

Lena’s old loft was in the Mercado District, which was sort of National City’s answer to SoHo; expensive, chic, full of art galleries and pricey restaurants and boutiques.  

Kara frowned.  “I don’t know, Lena.”

Cat sighed.  “Well, we don’t have to decide this instant.”

They all stood in silence for a moment.  

“The freedom will be nice,” Kara said, somewhat unconvincingly.

“Mm,” Lena agreed.

“Yes,” Cat sighed.  

They looked at each other, wondering what to do with themselves.  They opted for gratuitously loud hot tub sex, just because they could, followed by equally gratuitously loud couch sex, and once that was done, they realized that that was really the only thing they couldn’t do when Carter was around.  Granted, it was a big one, but the whole “freedom” thing was probably a little overblown.

*******

Not long after that, Kara found herself at the animal shelter looking at dogs.  Her eye caught on a little brown spaniel with wide blue eyes and an entreating look.  She snapped a photo and sent it to Lena.   _LOOK AT HIM,_ she texted.  

A moment later, Lena texted back.   _1 - That is Carter in dog form.  2 - Our wife will have a fit if you bring home a dog._

She texted back, _BUT LOOK AT HIS FACE._

She texted the picture to Cat.  

Cat texted back, _Absolutely not._

_BUT HIS FACE, CAT_

_SO HELP ME GOD KARA I AM NOT PLAYING WITH YOU._

So she didn’t come home with the dog.  But she wanted to.

*******

The odd thing about it all was that it took about a week for Carter’s absence to fully soak in as their new reality.  A week of Kara coming home from work and not finding him sprawled on the couch, watching Stargate reruns with the sound off and shyly flirting on the phone with that cute little nerdy girl from AP Physics.  A week of Lena not having someone to play Portal with in the evening before bed.  A week of Cat not having to edit his essays or help him interpret James Joyce’s “Ulysses”.  None of these things were everyday things, so it only really became weird after a stretch of time had passed in which they should have at least happened once.

Lena wasn’t a particularly gifted cook but she could pull together some dinner nachos for him, which he seemed to enjoy.  They’d usually spend the time while he wolfed them down talking about his friends, his college applications process, the next Star Wars movie or edition of Assassin’s Creed.  She usually had advice for him that his mother or Kara would be too horrified to give him:

“Look, Carter, if you have sex with Kimmy, use a condom.  I know you’re probably watching porn, but that’s not going to teach you anything useful.  You should be watching –”  And then she scribbled down a few titles on a post-it note along with a couple of strings of characters.  “–these… and that’s my login info for my private Ventures account.”  She subscribed to an online streaming erotica service that had come in handy on many occasions.  Now there was one more.

Carter was embarrassed, but he took the paper, and was quietly grateful for her recommendations later on.

Cat missed the trail of socks and underwear that would lead from the half bathroom to his bedroom two doors down, and the feeling of annoyance because she wanted to scold him for it, but how could she when she was twice as bad about leaving her things everywhere?

She missed cooking him proper dinners instead of that nacho nonsense that Lena was responsible for or the cheeseburgers and massive piles of homemade fries that Kara made him.  He got healthy food when she cooked for him.  She shuddered to think about what he was eating at school.  Kara had to restrain her from looking online at the readouts of his meal plan.  That restraint lasted about a week.  Then Lena had to restrain her from calling him and badgering to eat better, because this looked like an awful lot of tater tots and pizza.  

So, the three of them settled into slightly more intensive work schedules, made more time for each other, for dates, for relaxed, unrestrained sex.  He called each of them individually, depending on what he wanted help for, but sometimes he also called the house at a time of the evening when his odds were good that he’d catch two or more of them.  They’d pass the phone around and pepper him with questions.  They’d hang up, and for a few minutes, they’d all be buoyant, laughing over whatever stories he’d shared, and then the melancholy would set in and they’d go curl up on the couch together and watch something on cable.

*****

Kara came home one night to a quiet house.  “Hello?” she called, thinking that it was a bit late for neither Cat nor Lena to be home.  She wandered down the hall, calling them.  Then she noticed the light from Carter’s desk lamp spilling from his bedroom door.

She wandered over and found Lena sitting in his chair, looking at some half-finished renderings on the desk that he’d forgotten to take to school with him.  Her back was to the door.

“Lena?”

Lena turned around.  “Kara!” she exclaimed, surprised.  “I didn’t hear you come in.”  She hastily wiped her eyes.  

“You miss him,” Kara said gently.

Lena nodded.  “I knew I would a little, but… I’m surprised at how much.”

“That’s why you were so hot to change his room into something else,” Kara realized.  “And why you were acting like this wasn’t a big deal.”

Lena sighed, and another little tear spilled out one eye.  “He’s not even mine,” she sniffled, sounding as though she was scolding herself.

Kara came in and leaned over, pressing Lena’s face against her chest.  “No, but, in a way, he is.  You’ve lived with him for five years now, Lena.  He’s the closest thing to a son you’ve ever had.  Maybe that you ever will have, unless things change and Cat decides she wants to have another one, which…at this stage of her life, I don’t blame her if she doesn’t want to do it again.”

“Well, you or I could carry a baby,” Lena began.

Kara laughed.  “He hasn’t even been gone two months and you’re talking about getting pregnant?”

Lena looked sheepish.  “Not really.  I don’t know.”

Cat’s keys scraped in the lock, and then her footsteps echoed down the hall.  “We’re in Carter’s room!” Kara called.

Cat’s slender silhouette paused in the doorway.  She inspected the two of them for a moment.  “Oh, no,” she said finally.

“Oh, no, what?”  Kara replied, confused.

“I know what you two are plotting.  First you, Kara, with the puppy.  Then you, Lena, with your half-baked idea about tutoring underprivileged kids in science.  No, no, no.  I know what you two are thinking.  We are not baking a new one.”

An awkward quiet settled.  After a moment of stern glaring, Cat’s look softened and she walked into the room, and put her arms around the two of them.  “I miss him more than either of you can imagine.  I held him when he was the size of… a little kitten, I fed him from my breast, I spent sleepless nights while he cried because he couldn’t get a latch onto me.  I brought him into the world and gave him my body and soul and sleep and every breath I had to give.  Believe me, I feel his absence in a way you can probably understand intellectually, but you don’t know, not really.  I watched him grow, I watched him roll over and sit up and crawl and walk and learn to read.  My heart broke when he fell out of the monkey bars and needed a cast, and when he asked that girl to the middle school dance and she ignored him.  Every time I look at him he’s more and more like a man, and that breaks my heart too, because he’s the best, most beautiful thing I ever made.  There’s no replacing him, not for me.”

They rearranged themselves.  Lena stood up, and she and Kara held Cat between them, and let her cry on them as the real weight of this new stage of life crushed down on Cat’s shoulders.  Kara loved Carter, but it wasn’t the same.  And she felt suddenly foolish and a little selfish that she and Lena had been talking, however idly, about creating an entire new person to replace him.

Then, as quickly as Cat’s weeping began, it passed.  Her mood lightened, and Cat smiled up through damp eyes at the two of them.  “But,” she decided, “I know you both miss him too. So…”

“So?” Lena prompted.

“So, who thinks we should drive out to San Diego next weekend and take that giant teenager to the zoo?”

“Cat, he’ll be mortified,” Lena protested.

“I did find you sitting here crying in his room,” Kara pointed out.

“Shut up,” Lena scoffed.

Cat smiled.  Carter was a lucky boy, to have two stepmothers who loved him this much.  “Lena, you?” she teased.  “His Real Talk Vodka Stepmother?”

Lena blushed.  

“Well,” Cat said airily, “that settles it.  I’ll tell him we’re coming.”  She whipped out her phone from her trouser pocket.

Lena laid a gentle hand on Cat’s shoulder.  “Just a suggestion?”

“What’s that?”

“Don’t tell him we’re coming.  Ask him if he’s free to see us.  He’s trying to take steps toward adulthood.  We need to start treating him like one.”

Cat stared at her for a moment, dumbstruck, but clearly, she decided after a few seconds that Lena was right.  She tapped Carter’s number in her phone and waited while it rang.

“Carter!  Yes, hi sweetie!  No, everything’s fine.  The three of us were just missing you and… we thought maybe we’d drive out this weekend and see you… Do you have time?  Yes.  Alright, sweetie.  See you then.”   She hung up.  “Pack your bags, wives.  We’re going to San Diego.”


End file.
